Monday, April 11, 2005

A little bit of tinkering on a Sunday evening

As you might've noticed, I finally had a little bit of time last night to play around with the look/feel of the blog. I hope you like it better than the previous version.

I've also made quite a bit of progress in uploading my photo collection to flickr and tagging as many photos as possible (adam, friends, family, nature, cool, and of course the moblog). I hit the 1 gigabyte upload limit in March and April, so it'll be another couple of weeks before I can finish uploading the rest. I like flickr so far quite a bit. I truly hope they continue to innovate now that they've been bought out by Yahoo.

Earlier this year, I launched a new web site for the UM Hillel organization. It's finally up and running -- check it out and let me know what you think! Many thanks to my friend Alex for contributing design skills and artistic talent.

On the mates front -- we've finished the first stable version of the Relationship Engine and are almost done with the RS Navigator. I've been putting a little bit of time into throwing together a simple web site for the project. It's not finished yet, but here's what I've got so far: mates. Again, comments are very welcome!

Since the mates project still has quite a ways to go before we can package/ship a version, I decided it would be a good idea to create an RSS feed for it.. which got me to realize that I myself have been putting off trying out an RSS aggregator for quite some time. I toyed around with Thunderbird's built-in support a ways back, but it really lacked features.

So, I finally decided to take Mark Jen's advice and try Onfolio. It's amazing! I've moved all of my favorite sites with RSS feeds out of my Bookmarks/Favorites and into Onfolio.

This got me thinking.. sites are definitely going to lose ad revenue if rss/atom syndication becomes mainstream. It'll be interesting to see how this one plays itself out. I imagine I'll have more thoughts to post on it down the road..

I also realized that I'm probably going to naturally stop reading web sites that don't have syndication feeds, or whose feeds are difficult to find. For example, I couldn't find a feed for the i, cringely site. Sorry, but I just don't have the time to constantly manually poll your site for your latest stories! (sidenote: I'm finally starting to understand why Scoble's so militant about rss.)

On the flipside, I was pleasantly surprised to find a few non-blog and non-software sites like ThinkGeek, who have set up syndication feeds for content like new product arrivals. I wonder how much longer until rss/atom syndication "crosses the chasm" (or "tips" - heh!) and we start seeing non-tech sites using it. The day my favorite online tea store supports rss will be a very cool day indeed.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to do this with Blogger. Add that to the long wishlist of features everyone wishes Blogger had. With other blogging platforms, you can subscribe to a blog's comments or even subscribe to specific posts I believe.

Being able to subscribe via e-mail for updates would be neat too, especially if you could reply to an e-mail address and have that posted as a comment. I'm not aware of a blogging system that has this feature, but it might exist out there without my knowing ;)